’48 is an alternative history novel set in 1948 in which the Second World War ended with the release of a devastating plague by the defeated Hitler and, like The Spear, features British characters who sympathise with the Nazis.

The Spear deals with a neo-Nazi cult in Britain and an international conspiracy which includes a right-wing US general and an arms dealer. The Jonah is in large part the story of a police investigation, albeit by a policeman whose life is overshadowed by a supernatural presence. Others of Herbert’s books, such as Moon, Sepulchre and Portent, are structured as thrillers, and include espionage and detective story elements along with the supernatural. Haunted, the story of a sceptical paranormal investigator taunted by malicious ghosts, began life as a screenplay for the BBC, though this was not the screenplay used in the eventual film version. In Shrine, he explored his Roman Catholic heritage with the story of an apparent miracle which turns out to be something much more sinister. With his third novel, the ghost story The Survivor, Herbert used supernatural horror rather than the science fiction horror of his first two books. The third sequel, the graphic novel The City, is an adventure set in the post-nuclear future. Herbert has written three sequels to The Rats Lair deals with a second outbreak of the mutants, this time in the countryside around Epping Forest rather than in the first book’s London slums in Domain, a nuclear war means that the rats have become the dominant species in a devastated city. His first two books, The Rats and The Fog, are disaster novels with man-eating giant black rats in the first and an accidentally released chemical weapon in the second.

He left school at 15 and then studied at Hornsey College of Art and joined the art department of John Collings, a small advertising agency. He attended a Catholic school in Bethnal Green called Our Lady of the Assumption, then aged 11 he won a scholarship to St Aloysius Grammar School in Highgate. Early lifeīorn in London, Herbert is the son of a stall-holder at London’s Brick Lane Market. His books have sold over forty-two million copies. He is a full-time writer who also designs his own book covers and publicity. James Herbert, OBE (born 8 April 1943) is a best-selling English horror writer who originally worked as the art director of an advertising agency.

The City by James Herbert